How To Setup a Home NAS Server – QNAP TS-439 Pro Turbo

Creating User Accounts and Shares

The NAS supports user accounts so that you can control who has access to which shares. It also has user groups that will allow you to specify permissions by group. I started out by creating a user for myself and adding myself to the admin group.

While you could simply use the admin account as your only user, you would run into issues if you’re accessing files from Linux via NFS as I’ll discuss later. (Please read the Mixed Operating System Issues section below before creating any shares or copying files to your NAS if you intend to mount the shares from both Mac or Windows and Linux.)

In addition to creating a user for myself, I also created shares that I thought would be useful. At the time you create the shares, you need to decide which of your users can access them and if they can write to the share as well as read. Remember that if your wireless network is open and your shares are readable, anyone can search through your files.

I created a share for my Mac Time Machine backups, a share for my Archives, and a share to rip my DVDs into.